


And Crimson Welled

by ssstrychnine



Category: Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier, The Walking Dead (TV), The Walking Dead - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Civil War, Alternate Universe - No Zombies, American Civil War, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-11-10
Packaged: 2018-02-21 21:52:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 16,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2483702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are some wars fought without blood and some that drown in it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this is basically going to be a Cold Mountain crossover fic. It will follow the basic plot of that novel/movie if you're familiar with it (though not super closely, I'm still undecided about the ultimate direction of this fic). If you're not familiar with it, that doesn't matter, it'll just be a civil war au for you. I stole the title from another fic that I abandoned (I won't abandon this I promise, I have _plans_ ) but ultimately it came from a poem by Mervyn Peake called 'If Trees Gushed Blood' which starts the chapter off. This is also my first attempt at caryl fic, I hope you'll be kind to me (i'm kidding be ruthless), I'm so looking forward to writing a million more words.

_If trees gushed blood_  
 _When they were felled_  
 _By meddling man,_  
 _And crimson welled_

_From every gash_  
 _His axe can give,_  
 _Would he forbear,_  
 _And let them live?_

 

He never sees the person who shoots him. It’s just grey and dirt and the smell of gunpowder and then white hot pain at his side. All he can think is that he will taste mud for as long as he lives as he gets trodden down into that mess. Mud and blood. Mud and people’s flesh and splinters of bone and hanks of hair. He will drown in this mud, he thinks, he will taste mud for as long as he lives because he will _drown_ in it. But someone pulls him up, realising he’s not dead maybe, or thinking he is, and drags him back behind the lines and the sky is blue as anything before he shuts his eyes on it. _Come back to me_ , he thinks dizzily, that’s what she had said. 

The sound of screaming wakes him up. It always does. It’s as constant as cicadas in June. He’s lying in a hospital and someone is dying next to him. He’s young. A boy. Nowhere near eighteen. He’s screaming and pleading and Daryl can see red out of the corner of his eyes, a blur, like a sunset. He’s screaming and pleading and then abruptly he’s not. Daryl shuts his eyes again. 

He’ll be out of hospital soon enough, he thinks. Back to more screaming, a different kind, anger and fear and righteousness mixed in with the pain. He wonders how long it will be until he’s trodden into dirt once more. Someone else starts screaming and Daryl chews at his lip until it tastes rusty.

There’s a woman who comes in to change his bandages. Every single time she purses her lips and hisses in sympathy at his other scars, the ones that aren't from war, the ones that almost no one has seen, only the people who put them there. He hates her sympathy, wants to break her fingers, cool and businesslike on his skin. Carol’s fingers had calluses from gardening and her her hands had danced across piano keys. He would let her see his scars, he thinks, if he thought she wanted to. 

Daryl doesn't know if he’s dying like the rest of them. No one tells him. He thinks he’s not but bodies are carted out of his hospital ward every day and he can’t be sure he won’t be next. The wound at his side is hot, it aches dully, the pain burrows deeper inside him that the bullet ever did. He tells them it hurts more than it does and he writhes under the nurses touch, thrashes around away from her until his bandage blooms bright red with fresh blood and she has to stitch him up again. 

“I’ll drown,” he tells her one day, half delirious on pain pills, when she lifts his shirt up, lays a hand to his waist. “I’ll drown out there.” 

He reads the letters she sent him. Carol with the dancing hands. Carol with the dancing eyes. Carol with her husband tall and square and violent. He wonders if she sends him letters, he’s being shot at and trodden down somewhere too. He hopes she doesn’t, he wants all of her words for himself even if he doesn't deserve them. He runs his thumbs across the edges of the stacks of soft paper she’s sent him. Her handwriting is ungainly, curly, and cramped, but he reads the words over and over again and the paper grows grey with sweat from his palms. _Come back to me_ , she'd written in the most recent one, six months old. He has not replied to any.

His fever dreams are grey and red. He fights through wet sand up to his waist and it pulls him back and back and back and there are a thousand hands reaching for him too, the hands of the dead. When he wakes up he’s sweating and his bandage is rust-stained and his fingernails have bitten into the skin of his palms. There’s another man screaming beside him. Another child. He decides he has to leave.

In the middle of the night, freshly sewed and bandaged by the nurse with the quick fingers, he steals a coat from beside a dying man’s bed. He jams his hat down low over his eyes. He rolls the letters up and tucks them inside his pocket. He limps out of the hospital room and into the cold night. He walks passed rows of bodies with sheets draped over them, looking more like pillows on a bed than people with lost lives, and he takes a gun from one of them. He doesn't go the way he should, back to front lines and glory (mud and blood and flesh and _glory_ ). He doesn't go back to the war he cares nothing about (it’s geography and a brother who proudly wears blue that put him on a side). He heads back the way he come, a thousand years ago, to the mountains where Carol calls to him.

~ ~ ~

Carol lives alone. Her husband is at war. Her husband tall and square, cruel and terrible. Her husband who hurt her. He kept her from church putting bruises on her face and the women whispered about her, she knows this. Carol lives alone and her husband is at war and up the road in a big country house live the Greenes. Hershel and his daughters Maggie and Beth who are beautiful and sheltered and aren't quite sure how to live in this world that’s gone to Hell. Carol isn't sure either but she keeps going, she plants carrots in rows and she collects eggs from her chickens in the mornings. 

Hershel dies in his sleep one day and his daughters don’t leave their house for ten more. They come to Carol first, whip-lean and big eyed. Maggie tugs her sister by the hand, Beth who is blushing sixteen, who still has tear tracks down her face. Carol lets them in without a word.

“Without Daddy we’re unsure....we don’t know how to keep the farm running smooth,” Maggie explains, her voice admirably steady though her hands shake, clasped on the table.

“Anything you need, girls,” Carol says kindly. “It will be nice to have company sometimes.”

“Live with us,” Beth blurts, leaning far across the table. “The house is empty, it’s big.” 

Carol looks to Maggie who says nothing, just tugs a stray lock of hair behind her ears, her smile wavering. It would be strange, Carol thinks, living with the sunshine and light of _girls_ again. She’d had a daughter. Sophia with blue eyes and hair like sun setting on straw. She’d had a daughter and she’d lost a daughter. She looks around the room, full of Ed. Marks where his boots scuffed across the floor, where he kicked tables and chairs out of the way. There’s a hole in one wall that he made with his fist, hidden behind a framed painting of wild flowers. There are other things too, like feeling like she is always watched, like he’s around every corner, waiting to tell her what she’s done wrong and how she must be punished. 

Carol takes in a deep breath, folds her hands in her lap, smiles at the sisters.

“I’d be happy to,” she says finally. “I’ll bring seeds for planting and we’ll catch up my chickens, move them in with yours.” 

On her last night in her home ( _Ed’s_ home) she writes a letter. It’s been a forever since he left and she’s written him a thousand letters before and she’s had no reply. She knows she shouldn't expect one but she asks every time she’s at the store. 

“Ed’ll write you,” says Mrs Winters who owns it and Carol doesn't ever know what to say to that.

In her letter she tells him about the corn fields coming in and the birds nest she found in a window arch and the taste of the apple she stole from the the Greene farm. She tells him too that it won’t be theft anymore because she’ll be living there, with the Greene girls, without their father, and she tells him that she’ll be happy not to be alone. She tries to keep the longing out of her words but she knows it's there, hidden amongst apples and weather. There is nothing to ask of him, she knows all the stories from the front, glorious victory and crushing defeat. She signs off the same in every letter, _yours_. It took her an hour to write that word the first time but now the ink flows easily. _Come back to me_ , she writes too, feeling as brave as Maggie and Beth. She has never written a letter to Ed. She writes only to Daryl.


	2. Chapter 2

Carol Peletier meets Daryl Dixon in the summer before the war. They’re building a new church and Ed isn't helping (he’s working on the farm, he says, but it’s more likely he’s drinking) but he lets her go with Maggie and Beth to serve tea to the workers. They all come down from the frame of the building, warm with sun and shiny with sweat, and the three women hand out tall glasses of cool tea and apples. But one man doesn't leave his spot, stays perched near the top, hammering slats down for the roof, a dark figure against bright sun, ignoring the others as they climb down around him.

“That’s Daryl Dixon,” Maggie says, noticing Carol watching him.

“He hates everyone ‘cept his brother,” Beth offers, covering her mouth with a hand, hiding a smile.

“He’s probably just shy,” Carol says peaceably and she wonders how she hasn't seen him before. He looks like a crow perched up on the rafters, sketched out in blacks and greys. She pours herself a drink from the jug. “I’ll bet he comes down soon, it’s hot today.”

But he doesn't and the steady noise of the hammer against nails beats down on Carol like the heat of the sun and she can’t keep her gaze from travelling to him every few minutes.

“He must be thirsty,” she murmurs quietly, frowning at him.

“You ought to try and get him down,” Maggie suggests, grinning widely. “If you’re so worried about him. It’ll be some entertainment for us too.”

“I’ll bet you can’t get him down one foot,” Beth says impishly “I’ll bet two days on my piano.” 

Carol laughs, thinks of the beautiful piano in Hershel Greene’s hallway and the way her fingers will feel gliding across the keys. Not like the church piano, disused and clumsy and hollow sounding, but light and bold and melodious. She laughs again, shakes her head, pours another glass of tea and slips an apple into the front pocket of her apron. 

She walks over to the building until she’s standing underneath the point where he is, up high and still working. She shades her eyes to look up at him.

“Excuse me,” she calls. She watches him startle, watches a nail fall from his grip to the ground next to her. He turns his head and scowls at her, his hair is plastered to his face with sweat and he looks wicked and feral and dangerous. She smiles at him. “You must be thirsty, why don’t you climb down and take a drink.”

He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth self consciously, looking out across the fields behind her instead of at her, chews at the corner of his thumb, the hand that dropped the nail.

“Who are you?” he calls down, his voice ragged, raw sounding.

“Carol Peletier.” 

“You’re Ed’s wife?”

It’s her turn to startle a little. She doesn't expect the question and it hits her like hearing Ed’s name on someone else’s lips always hits her. Somewhere just below the heart, her ribs or her flesh or the core of her, she isn't sure, it feels like missing a step, the point just before you realise you haven’t fallen. She shakes it off, like she always does, she smiles up at him again and nods.

“Yes, I am,” she says.

He’s silent for a long moment, still staring at the mountains in the distance, before tucking his hammer into his belt, and then the nails into his pockets, and starting the climb down. It takes him less than a minute and then he’s next to her. Up close he looks somehow both more and less feral than he did standing against the sky. More because his eyes drift over her, never stopping, and he chews at the edge of his lip, and his hair is ragged and dark with sweat, and he hunches over his hands like he expects the glass of tea she gives him to disappear or be snatched away at any moment. And less because he’d wiped his hands across the thighs of his trousers before taking the glass, and because he’d taken it at all, and because he was scary enough that Maggie and Beth whispered but not too scary that they didn't smile too.

His eyes are blue, clear and light, and that surprises her too. When he was stood up high she imagined his eyes black as night.

They stand together in silence. He leans against the frame of the building.

“If I’d taken tea from those girls, people’d act like I was tryin’ to haul em off into the woods,” he says finally. He drags a finger around the rim of the glass, collecting condensation, flicks the drop off into the grass.

“The wolf in the fairy tales,” Carol says and he looks away, scrubs at his hair with damp fingers, gulps down the rest of the tea in one go.

“Somethin’ like that,” he mutters and he turns to leave. “Thank you,” he says to the ladder in front of him instead of to her, and then he’s climbing up again as fast as he can go.

Carol watches him, tilts her face up to the sun and shades her eyes and in a minute he’s back hammering in nails. She hadn't give him the apple and she places it carefully on a beam alongside the ladder. Then she turns and walks back to Maggie and Beth and they’re laughing with delight at this impossible thing, getting _Daryl Dixon_ to speak, and she laughs too, and turns back to look at him, working hard, the crow on rafters again.

Later, when she’s playing Beth’s piano, she thinks of him again. She wonders if he’d listen to the music she played, if he’d like it. Ed had never cared for the piano, had once slammed the lid of one down on her fingers, bruised them so badly she hadn't been able to play for months. He told her it was frivolous, to play music, she ought to be baking bread or working on the garden. She’d agreed with him at the time, like she’d had a choice. She gets caught on the thought and her fingers miss a note and she stops, curls them into her palms, closes the lid carefully. 

“This won’t do,” she tells herself quietly. “You've no business thinking of any man you’re not married to.”

“You alright, Carol?” Beth calls from the other room and Carol busies herself with standing up and brushing down her skirts and smoothing a hand across the smooth, soft wood of the piano.

“Fine, sweetheart. Thank you,” she calls back, and she leaves the big house quickly. Ed will be wanting lunch soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading :)


	3. Chapter 3

Daryl doesn't get far before word reaches him of the Confederate Home Guard. They’re hunting down deserters. Some say they’re killing them on the spot, others say they’re chaining them up, dragging them back into war. He hears this from the few people he allows to see him, scared girls and old men, they’re the safest he reasons. When he’s got enough information he gets off the road entirely. _Come back to me_ , Carol had written, and he repeats the words over and over in his head, a reason that seems better to him that _I’m scared_ or _I don’t want to die_ or _I don’t believe in the cause_. 

Walking through swamps and wastes and abandoned farmland, he doesn't see a soul for months. He always keeps a hand to his stolen gun anyway, sleeps in trees, lashes himself to branches with his belt. He only falls out once but it tears some of his stitches and the dirty bandages get dirtier. It aches still and the wound is an angry red. 

In his dreams the dead come back to life. They are piecemeal and falling apart, rotten, ragged scraps of flesh held up by cracked bones and torn muscles. Sometimes he recognises the people they used to be, men he fought with, and he wakes up with his cheeks wet and dirt under his fingernails from tearing up the earth around him. 

Just when he starts to think that maybe he’ll never see another human being again (he reads Carol’s letters every night but without her there and warm and _there_ , he itches for her), he runs into two of them. It’s a girl, a slave girl, with her eyes closed, limp in the arms of a man with his back to Daryl, and he pulls his weapon, touches his finger to the trigger, thinks about the echo a shot will make, the game it will scare. He’s been living on squirrels, cooked when he risks a fire, raw most of the time, and scuttling crabs in the swamps. 

“Put down the girl,” he calls, the first thing he’s said in weeks, his voice coming out in a painful rasp. The man turns around and Daryl nearly drops the gun, nearly falls down just about (to drown in mud, to get what’s coming to him), because the man holding the (pregnant) girl is his brother Merle, down his right hand, and crying.

Neither of them say anything, for a long time they just stare at one another, and Daryl doesn't lower his weapon, and Merle doesn't put down the girl, they just stare. 

“Is she alive?” Daryl asks finally, his voice cracking (he still doesn't lower the gun, Merle watches the barrel, his eyes, dry now, narrow).

“Yeah,” he grunts. “Put the gun down.” 

Daryl lowers his weapon, tucks it back into it’s holster. Merle. Missing a hand, carrying a pregnant slave. As terrible as it is, this does not surprise him as much as it should. 

“What’re you doin’ with her?” Daryl asks after another long pause. “What happened to your hand?”

“What d’you think happened? Some bastard with a bayonet cut it off,” he mutters, shifting awkwardly so the girl sits better in his arms. The pregnant girl. The pregnant, unconscious, slave girl. Merle missing a hand. His brother who has blacked his eyes a dozen time but walked him to school more. Who had taught him to tie his shoelaces and plow a field and told him he was worthless every day of his life. Daryl blinks his head clear, steps closer.

“You gonna kill her?” 

“I was planning on it, drown her in this swamp maybe,” Merle mutters, looking at the girl, his expression full of doubt. “Can’t have her popping a baby of mine out, it’ll only go bad.”

“So you kill her?” 

Merle shrugs, kicks at the dirt.

“Nothin’ to do with you anyhow.”

“Put her back where she came from,” Daryl says, his thumb brushing across the handle of his gun. Merle is unarmed and missing a hand. This would not be difficult (this would be the hardest thing in the world). The girl is just a girl but she deserves better than ending up face down in some swamp with her belly swollen. “You don’t wanna kill some girl.” 

Merle is silent, watches Daryl for awhile, his eyes narrowed dangerously still. There’s wildness in him somewhere. He might really want to kill the girl. He might feel like pinning the whole war on this girl. It’d be easy for him to do, Daryl knows this, Merle always did find it easy to put blame anywhere but himself. But he’d been _crying_ too and he sighs, shrugs the girl over his shoulder, and takes off into the bush.

“I’ll take her back, you wait here, alright? I won’t kill her, I’ll even promise it,” he calls back to Daryl before he disappears.

Daryl doesn't move for a beat. His hand is warm on his gun still and he shakes his head and lets it go. He wouldn't shoot his brother, not for a girl or for war or for anything really. Blood beats blood, he thinks, and he sighs and sets about putting together a fire.

When Merle comes back it’s crackling nicely and there’s meat cooking, a couple of frogs skewered on sticks. Merle flops down beside him, lets out a sigh, nudges his brother with a shoulder.

“Done what you asked,” he says, sounding a little bit proud, a lot tired. “How’d I get such a soft touch for a brother anyway?”

Daryl answers with a shrug, pokes at the frogs in the fire. He hadn't thought he’d ever see Merle again, thought the war would chew them both up and spit them out in pieces, and it had, really, but Merle is sat next to him and there’s a fire burning and it feels a little bit like their first hunting trips when they were children. Just a little bit.

“They send you home ‘cause of your hand?” Daryl asks then. _I missed you_ , he wants to say but he know Merle wouldn't appreciate it.

“Naw,” Merle laughs bitterly. “They wan’ me back, they wan’ me to fight with it. We’re losing y’know.”

“It’s a stupid war,” Daryl says. “I’m going back to the mountain.”

“I was thinkin’ of doin’ the same thing,” Merle says easily. “Got caught up in this old slave camp a while but I been lookin’ for a change.”

Daryl doesn't reply. Travelling with his brother will be easy, he knows this, Merle is good at hunting and he fights well and he defends his blood as viciously as Daryl does, when necessary. But two people are easily spotted especially when one of them is Merle. He worries his lower lip between his teeth, stares at the fire.

“I’m glad to see you,” he says finally and Merle grins, claps him on the back, and it’s settled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and commenting and things, you are all angels


	4. Chapter 4

Ed leaves for the war early, the first wave, one of the men who thinks it will all be over and done in a month and they’ll need to be fast to get their share of glory. Carol had cried when he told her and he’d mistaken joy and relief for grief. He might have knocked her teeth out if he’d known she was crying with happiness, but he didn't, he hugged her to him roughly with one arm, and she tried hard not to laugh.

She learns later that Daryl’s brother Merle had been one of those men too when she sees Daryl the day after, sat outside in the sun with a blackened eye and a stubborn scowl, reading from a battered book. He turns away when she walks passed but she notices that his eyes stop moving and that he freezes up until she’s gone. It makes her heart beat rapidly and her insides twist and she walks a little faster. 

“What happened to Daryl’s face?” she asks Maggie curiously, later that evening. “He been running into walls?”

“I wouldn't doubt it,” Maggie says, amused. “But more likely it’s his brother, Merle. He left for the fighting yesterday, probably figured Daryl would join him.”

“And he didn't.”

“I suppose not. Why are you so interested anyway?” Maggie’s eyebrow is raised like she knows the answer but Carol brushes it off with a shrug. Truthfully _she_ doesn't' even know the answer.

“I saw him reading,” she says vaguely. “I guess I thought he’d be off to fighting too.”

At home (the rooms joyously empty), she hums in the kitchen and spins around with her arms held wide. She lies on the bed she’s shared with Ed for eighteen years and she smiles at the ceiling and then buries her face in her hands and cries for reasons she doesn't quite understand. For being alone but not lonely and for love she might have had once but doesn't anymore and for some tiny respite from those eighteen years. A gap in the line. A gap that might stay open forever. She won’t wish for his death, she _doesn't_ , but she cries all the same. 

She picks out books later, when she’s wrung out from crying and she’s revelling in the empty house again. Books are things Ed won’t notice are gone when he comes back (if he comes back, _if_ ). She picks a dusty volume of poetry she bought when Sophia died, and William Bartram, flowers and animals and everything you miss when you’re gone from Carolina. She places the books on the table, places her hands over the covers, draws finger lines through the dust and flips through the pages.

“ _Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest-lasting_ ,” she reads out loud and she smiles and sighs. She reads all through the night and falls asleep at the table and dreams about her dead child and about Daryl Dixon who turns pages with calloused fingers and won’t look her in the eye.

She goes to him the next day. She takes the books, wiped free of dust and tears. He is sitting outside on the deck of the small room where he lives and his eye is bruised into a blue and yellow sunset and he is not reading. He stumbles to his feet when she stops, looks at her, wary as a cat, his hands deep in his pockets and his eyes hidden behind a hank of dark hair.

“I’ve brought you these,” she tells him, offering him the volumes. He doesn't take them, he looks at them with unmasked hostility, his hand drifts to his mouth and he chews at the edge of his thumb then pulls it away violently. A behaviour he’s been scolded for, Carol thinks.

“What for?” he grunts, rocking back on his feet, as far from her as he can get without turning tail and running away.

“I...I saw you reading yesterday,” she says quietly, suddenly unsure. Her heart is beating hard and she regrets doing this with every part of her. Why should she bring _him_ books? Daryl who she hardly knows, who took a glass of tea from her once, who has eyes like clear water. “You don’t have to take them,” she corrects herself, stumbling over her words.

He takes them. He thumbs through the pages and she thinks he will throw them to the ground, crush them to dust, and she thinks that will make her cry, but he doesn't.

“Your husband went out?” he asks instead and she nods. He nods too, drags his fingers across the cover of one of the books, like she had done the night before, nods again and leaves, taking the books with him.

Carol stands on the deck, swaying slightly, stretching her fingers out until the joints crack and then curling them in again. She smooths down her skirts and she goes back home.

With Ed gone she visits Maggie and Beth and Hershel almost every day. She takes them bunches of flowers she picks along the road and they put them in vases and glass jars and she fills her own house with them too. She can’t remember the last time she had flowers in any room. She can’t remember the last time the house smelled like something other than stale whiskey and dirty wood. With Ed gone she plays the piano at church every Sunday and everything sounds suddenly beautiful on the old, battered instrument. The first time she plays, the day after she’d given Daryl her books, he waits for her afterward.

“You gonna be alright without Ed? In your house?” he asks her and she smiles. He is close to her, as close as he’s ever been, she can see his pulse jumping at his neck and she thinks that if she touched him he would feel hers through her fingertips. 

“I’ll be fine, Daryl,” she says gently and he leaves without another word.

He comes to her home that night, jittery and defiant all at once, shifting from foot to foot and scowling majestically. 

“I got these,” he starts, rushing into it, shoving a bundle of papers at her. “My ma played, I think, but she’s not around to want ‘em now...”

She looks at what he’s given her, a pile of sheet music for a piano.

“I don’t have a piano,” she says faintly and he shrugs, an awkward, stiff motion, and stares at the papers like he might just snatch them back. “Thank you,” she says and they stand in the dark in silence and she wants to drop the papers, take his hands in hers, press her palms to his and tangle their fingers together, but she doesn't, she just grips the papers tighter and watches as his hands form fists at his sides. He steps toward her and her breath catches and then he rocks back on his heels, jams his hands in his pockets, gives her a stilted nod, and disappears into the night.

Inside the book, pressed flat but still beautiful, still new, too new to be something his mother left there, is a flower. A Cherokee rose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Carol reads is Here the Frailest Leaves of Me and it might be an anachronism I'm not totally sure when it was published but oh well! There are sure to be worse historical inaccuracies to come. Thank you for reading ily all


	5. Chapter 5

“Why didn't you come wit’ me?” Merle asks, their second night together. Daryl has been waiting for this question since he found his brother. Dreading it as they trudged through foul smelling water and Merle swiped at buzzing insects and neither of them spoke at all. But it’s not until they’re sat around a fire and Merle’s actually caught a fish and he’s watching Daryl with his eyes full of flames that he asks.

“I didn't wanna die,” Daryl says, hoping it’s enough. He wonders at the real reason he didn't leave for war when Merle did. He stayed because he wanted to see that Carol would keep alright, this woman he didn't know, who had barely spoken to him, who had a smile like sunlight. Besides, it wasn't really the reason, his cowardice was the truth, but he knows that will be even harder for Merle to accept than _I stayed behind for a bit for a woman_. 

“And you ain't,” Merle mutters, looking away. “Got all your limbs an e’rything.” 

“I was shot,” Daryl says but his words are empty and Merle knows it. He’d always said his little brother was a coward, a _soft touch_ , and now there was proof. He hadn't wanted to fight to start with and he’d run away at his first chance. Merle spits into the fire and Daryl leans back, folds his arms under his head and looks up into darkness. He’d rather see nothing than the disgust that crawls over Merle’s face. Merle who was going to kill a slave girl he got pregnant. Merle who was better than Daryl ever would be. 

“Don’t need to cry about it,” Merle laughs shortly, a harsh, bitter sound that twists Daryl's insides. 

Silence falls again and pretty soon the only sound is the dying fire and Merle’s heavy breathing as he falls asleep. Daryl moves closer to the light, struggles to pull out the bundle from inside his coat. One of the books Carol gave him, poems, the cover torn off so he could roll it tight around the letters she sent and keep it close through mud and terror. The picture’s there too, the tintype she had made for him, her face, stark and fierce and beautiful in shades of grey. He flips through the pages, dirty and worn and almost unreadable. _A woman waits for me--she contains all, nothing is lacking_ , he reads in the fast fading light of the fire, and he bites through the edge of his lip until he can taste blood. 

He wakes up in the middle of the night to a man sat across from him. Not his brother who is snoring fitfully, not anyone he knows, but a nervous looking man with his hands held over the still glowing embers of the old fire. Daryl has his gun out in an instant, has kicked his brother awake. The wound at his side screams at the sudden stretch of his muscles and he staggers and almost falls but keeps the gun steady. The man doesn't move, raises his hands in the air. He’s shaking violently, frozen in place, whimpering. 

“Kill him,” Merle says, his voice dangerously low and cold. Daryl frowns, lowers his gun slightly. 

“What you want?” he demands. 

“J-J-just to warm my hands,” the man stutters. “Just for a moment.” 

“ _Kill_ him, Daryl,” Merle growls. “Or d’you want me to kick him dead?”

“Get,” Daryl snarls and the man staggers to his feet, limps off into the swamp, stumbling at every branch until he’s out of sight.

“You ought to gimme that gun,” Merle mutters darkly. “You’re gon’ get us killed.” 

“He wasn't a threat.”

“He’s got a mouth,” Merle retorts viciously. “He got legs too.” 

“We’ll move then,” Daryl sighs. “Come on.” 

They leave the embers of their fire behind, trudge deep into the swamp until the darkness makes it impossible. Daryl sleeps with his back against a tree and Merle sprawled out in front of him. Daryl keeps the gun and Merle hasn't said a word about it but Daryl can feel something rumbling deep and terrible between them. 

They’re caught early the next morning. Men with rifles and uniforms and vicious grins catch them in the swamp and haul them back out to the road in chains. Merle doesn't say anything, Merle is uncharacteristically quiet. The gun is taken from them and the chains around their wrists are rusted and stained with blood. There are other men with them, chained _to_ them, a line who shuffle down the road while men on horses trot next to them and spit insults. Daryl’s letters and his book and the picture burn a place against his heart and he thinks that any moment they they will be taken from him and laughed at but no one checks inside his coat. 

The uniformed men talk loudly about killing them. They have orders to bring every deserter back to the front lines but it’s hard work and thankless too and they talk about shooting them all and dumping the bodies in ditches. Merle twitches with anger, shakes and trembles and hisses, and Daryl knows it won’t take long for his banks to burst. 

It happens on the fourth night. Four days walking away from Carol. _Come back to me_ , she’d said, and he wanted to. Desperately. But there they were, four days gone and asleep on the side of the road, chains rattling with every movement any of them made.  
And then it’s Merle who’s moving, shuffling closer to Daryl who isn't sleeping at all, kept awake by the pain at his side and counting minutes he’s lost.

“You remember when you was a kid and I chained you to that fence?” Merle asks, sounding calmer than he has in days. 

Daryl says nothing. He remembers, of course, Merle cuffing him to a fence in the middle of a field and explaining to him how to break your thumbs the right way to pull your hands free. Telling him he was bound to end up in chains one way or another and Dixon’s didn't let themselves be caged. 

“Don’t,” is all that Daryl says, but Merle is moving again and the chains rattle like music. 

Merle hits the first soldier silent and deadly, has a gun in his hand in the time it takes to draw breath, and Daryl follows him, crouched low against the ground, holding a loop of chain in his fists. The men around them start to move, coming awake and confused in pitch black night. Daryl can hardly see anything and then Merle fires a shot and the air around his brother flares hot orange and vicious and someone starts screaming. It’s a mess from then on. The soldiers fire without checking, they aren't trained and it’s dark and Merle has shot two of them before anyone even knows what’s happening but the soldiers have shot more. Daryl takes another, wraps his chains around a man’s neck as he staggers to his feet and pulls back and back until he stops struggling. There are men crying and Daryl can hear them breathing like they've never stopped running in all their lives, ragged and terrified. Someone tries to bolt and is tugged back by the length of chain at his hands and one of the soldiers shoots at the movement and he falls. The horses are screaming too and rearing up and one of them takes a stray bullet and then everything is sticky with blood and dust. Daryl can’t see Merle. 

He remembers when he was ten and Merle was nineteen and they went and stayed on their own in a cabin in the forest for almost a month. Their mother had died, their father was drinking, it wasn't safe to be at home, Merle said. Merle who left a year later, taught Daryl everything he knew about anything and left. Their father was still drinking, it still wasn't safe to be at home. Daryl can’t see Merle and everything is so _loud_. 

When Daryl falls he doesn't try to get up. The world rages around him and there’s blood on his face but he doesn't think it’s his. He is trapped under the body of another one of the prisoners. He’d been pulled to earth by the man’s body hitting the ground, and the wound at his side made it impossible for him to stand so he just shuts his eyes to the men who are moaning and crying and writhing around him and hopes that none of them are Merle.

The air gets lighter after some time and the moans stop and it’s silent when he can finally see everything around him. A pile of dead men and horses. There’s only one other person moving, quietly weeping beside him. Just a kid with a dirty face and half his shoulder blown wide open. Not Merle because Merle is lying next to Daryl with his head shattered by a bullet and his teeth bared. Merle whose blood was drying itchily on Daryl’s face. Daryl who is still breathing. He gets to work.

He ignores the kid crying next to him, the only other person alive, and he deals with the chains first. He thinks first that he'll have to break his thumbs like Merle taught him but then he realises that everyone is dead and he fumbles at a soldier's body to get the keys and leaves the chains in a puddle on the ground. After the field and the fence Merle made him practice breaking his bones a thousand times and his hands always ached in the winter but he was never kept in cuffs longer than a night. 

He drags his brothers body up a hill and into a shallow gully. He leaves the rest behind. The kid has gone silent now. He doesn't bury Merle, can’t dig in the frozen dirt with just his hands, pulling him up the slope had been hard enough, and he doesn't want to stay that close to the road in any case. He closes Merle’s eyes, turns him to face the dirt, arranges his limbs as neatly as he can. His eyes burn with tears that he won’t shed because Merle would hate that (Merle would hate all of this, Merle would have expected Daryl to get shot along with him). Instead, he takes Merle’s boots because they’re in better condition than his, even if they don’t fit well, and he heads back into the forest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! The poem Daryl reads is another Walt Whitman called "A Woman Waits For Me"


	6. Chapter 6

Carol’s first week living at the Greene farm is scattered and awkward. The girls are exhausted and grieving still. They had spent their ten days alone digging a grave and scrounging up eggs to eat from increasingly difficult to find nesting places when their chickens got loose from the coop. Carol does what she can. She digs up gardens and shows them how to do it themselves. Hershel had been a preacher who had moved his family from the city to improve his failing health. He thought he should be more concerned with the feel of things than their practicality, if he was going to die, it would be somewhere beautiful. He’d bought sheep because he wanted to look at sheep and because that was what you _did_ in the country. But when the workers had left to war they’d grown wild and their wool had matted and most of them had disappeared. The girls hadn't noticed. 

It’s slow, but it gets easier. Carol teaches them what should be planted and at what time of year and they drag a hand plow doggedly through the smallest of their fields. It will be winter soon and they are running out of food. The whole town is. A tomato vine grows up and over the bannister of the wide deck that encircles their whole house and they eat salads made from the fruit drizzled with vinegar and salt and not much else. 

The house grows wild and the girls with it. Slowly they learn where the chickens lay their eggs most often and they build another coop for Carol’s and catch the rest after months of trying. One of them scrapes Beth’s arm raw with a spur and for days afterwards she is convinced she’s going to die, that the vicious rooster is the devil come to fetch her, punishment for not saying her prayers or for not looking after her daddy well enough. 

Months pass and when she’s been there almost a year Carol cuts off her hair because it can’t be washed anyway. It stays wet for too long and they can’t spare the water and they've no cause for vanity anymore. It curls around her temples and her ears and her jaw in wispy grey tendrils and she thinks that whatever she had left of girlhood has gone with it. Beth compliments her outrageously and Maggie smiles at her but Carol knows it’s for show. She feels like she’s suddenly grown old. 

The girls’ soft hands grow calluses and Beth makes a throwaway comment about how all the boys are gone anyway, she’ll never be married, and Carol thinks of Daryl for the first time in what feels like forever. They had been so busy she’d had no time to write him anything since she’d asked him to come back. She wonders what he would think of her with her hair hacked off and her hands rough as a mans and dirty fingernails. She hopes he would not mind, even though she knows she will never see him again, she hopes that in spite of everything he might call her beautiful.

The Home Guard visit the farm. Men too old for fighting or too sick. Men who have grown vicious with power and control.

“You seen your husband, Mrs Peletier?” asks a man, tall on his horse with a patch over one eye and a smile that shows all his teeth. She doesn't recognise him but his words shock her pale and still and she shakes her head fervently, unable to form words, unable even to think. Maggie takes her hand, grips it tightly in hers. 

“He’s fighting like everyone else,” Maggie says, tilting her chin like a challenge. “Excepting you brave warriors.” 

“Ed’s gone from the fighting, we heard he’s around these parts again.” 

“N-no,” Carol manages. “We haven’t seen him.” 

One of the men winks at Beth and she scowls at him defiantly and the men turn their horses around, head back into town, _we’ll be coming back_ , they say, and Carol sinks down to the steps of the deck, shaking like a leaf. There are threats in their words worse than her husbands name. She has to protect her girls, they have no one else to do it. 

“I’ll need to go home,” she whispers. “My house, I mean.” 

“No,” Maggie says, her voice soft as ash. “They will do nothing if they can’t find him.”

“They’ll kill me if they do find him,” Carol says flatly. “They’ll do worse to you.”

She goes despite Maggie and Beth’s protests. She takes Hershel’s old rife though she doesn't know how to use it. She slings it over her shoulder and heads into town. 

The house is far wilder than the farm. She hasn't been back there in a long time, has only passed it on her way to the store in the middle of town, avoided looking at it like the windows are eyes. Ed’s house, covered in vines and grass up to your waist. Ed’s house with a cracked window and rusted hinges on the front door that scream when she opens it. She unslings the gun from her shoulder, holds it out in front of her, keeps her finger well away from the trigger. Ed is there, slumped over the table with a half empty bottle. Ed is _there_. 

“Carol?” he mumbles, sitting up as soon as she enters the room.

“Get out,” Carol hisses, raising her gun. “You ain't here, Ed, I won’t let you be here.”

He stands up, fury colouring his face red and wicked. He doesn't look like her husband, he looks thin and tired and haunted behind the eyes. His hair is long and his hands are shaking. He staggers, sways, and suddenly he is Ed again but Ed without everything he used to hurt her. His fists clench all the same and he steps around the table toward her all the same but he _can’t hurt her_. Her finger drifts to the trigger.

“Stop, Ed,” she says coldly. “Get out, go back to the war.”

“We’re losing,” he tells her in this dumbfounded voice, a puppy kicked, a fish gulping at air. 

“Go on and lose then,” she says. “It’s a stupid war.” 

He moves closer with fists raised and she flinches instinctively but then she sees him again, soft and safe and scared. Nothing like the man that she’d married, tall and square and charming. Not even like the man she’d really married, cruel and vicious and stupid. He’s nothing, he’s less than that. And something must change in her expression because his eyes widen and his fists drop. 

“Darlin’-” he starts and she cuts him off with a sharp gesture, tugging the gun through the air, a movement that makes _him_ flinch.

“Don’t you darlin’ me, I’m not gonna get those girls hurt ‘cause of you,” she says. “I’ll tell the Home Guard if you stay and they’ll kill you Ed, you gotta leave.” 

His hands pull at the air, a futile gesture like he’s trying to take her back, and she holds her ground and squares her shoulders, keeps her hands steady on the gun and her chin tilted high. He gives up quickly. He nods and a shuddering sigh shivers through his body.

“I’ll go when it’s dark,” he mumbles. “I promise I’ll be gone by morning. I can’t leave ‘til it’s dark out.” 

“No,” Carol agrees quietly. “I’ll be checkin’ you told the truth tomorrow.” 

“Alright,” he says, a man at the end of his rope, frayed and defeated.

She leaves the house, shoulders the gun only when she’s back on the street, near runs back to the farm. The girls are wet eyed and wan when she gets back and Beth flies to her in an instant, hugs her close, and Carol smooths down her bright hair. The gun is still at her back and she knows what she wants to do with it. 

“We all need to know how to use this,” she tells them when they’re settled and warm and together. Maggie’s eyes drift to the gun, propped up against the wall by the door. “We’ll need to hunt for winter, we can’t live on potatoes.” 

Maggie’s expression doesn’t change, her eyes don’t shift from the gun, but Carol knows what she’s thinking. She’s thinking of the real reason they need to learn how to shoot. The Home Guard, Ed, men with war in their heads and unsteady hands. Men who think they’d like to own an unattached women and the land she sits on. Carol knows this and Maggie knows this and maybe even Beth does, quiet and still and far graver than a girl with her face should be. 

Maggie gathers up jars and pieces of wood and sets them up outside on the top of a fence over a paddock and lets Carol takes first shot.

Later, they sleep together in Hershel’s old, big bed, warm and tired and too scared to be on their own. Carol thinks of Sophia, thinks what it might be like with her daughter with them. Her girl. She would be thirteen years old and pretty as the sunshine, Carol decides. Pretty like Beth and pretty like Maggie. They’re her girls too, and they need something to distract them. So in the silence and dark of night, lit only by a flickering candle, she tells them about Daryl.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading :)


	7. Chapter 7

They kiss only once. He is called to war. Maggie tells her this with a knowing look and Carol brushes it off like it’s nothing, a twist of her mouth, a shrug of her shoulders, he’s just another dead man. But in her empty home she presses her hand to her mouth so hard her teeth cut the back of her lips and she grinds the knuckles of her hand into the table to keep from crying out. He’s going to war, following her husband and a hundred thousand other men. He’s going to war and he’s leaving her behind. 

She gets a tintype made because she’s not sure what else she can do. The man who makes it has known her since childhood, known Ed too, and he looks at her like she’s dirt under a boot and she squares her shoulders at him, as tough and solid as she can be with her hands shaking. It doesn't look like her in the image, it’s a woman with a fierce gaze and clear eyes, a woman challenging the person looking at her, a woman in shades of grey with eyes like thunder. It’s not her, but she takes it to Daryl anyway. 

He is not sitting outside his room like he usually is, on the steps, reading in the sun. His door is closed and she steps up to it and away twice before she dares to knock. He opens it stripped to the waist and she sees only a glimpse of scarred flesh and golden skin before the door is slammed in her face. She wants to touch him. She wants him to open the door and pull her inside with him where she can taste the salt of his skin. But the door is closed and she is clutching an envelope with a picture of a woman who isn't her and she turns to leave. This was a mistake. 

The door opens again as she comes to her decision and she whirls back to him, thrown off balance. He has a shirt on now, he ducks his head at her, doesn't say anything, and she opens her mouth and then closes it again, dances her fingers across the paper of the envelope holding her image. She can’t bring herself to speak so she just holds it out to him and then pulls her hand away quickly when he takes it. 

“I don’t look pretty,” she tells him as he flips open the envelope’s seam. “The man who made it said something to me that weren't pretty, so I don’t look it.” 

He stares at the picture for a long while and his thumb brushes across the image of her like he’s touching her face. 

“You don’t have to- “ she starts but her words fail when he looks at her finally, through his eyelashes, under his hair. And then he takes her hand and pulls her backward through his open door and when they’re inside he shuts it again. 

His room is dimly lit and small. Piles of books are tumbled against each other along the walls and there’s a battered cot in one corner and an old, dirty drysink in another. Daryl has dropped her hand and she is pressed against the door and he is looking at her like he’s not sure where to start. She isn't either, this is a dangerous place to be. Away from the other buildings and eyes of the small town, being in his room prickles at her skin. He puts her picture in his pocket, freeing his hands, and Carol’s heart beats like the wings of a bird. 

She moves before him, takes just one step forward, and it seems to break something in the air that’s keeping them apart because then one of his hands is at her jaw and one is at the small of her back and she’s flush to him somehow and he’s kissing her. Her palm is pressed to his chest and she curls her fingers under his collar to his skin, drapes the other arm around his neck, kisses him back like she would stop breathing if they weren't touching. They fall almost, sway in the dirty light of his room. Her knees buckle and she stumbles against him and laughs against his lips and he actually smiles, just a little bit, and they hold each other up to keep close. 

And that’s it. Just one kiss that leaves them both breathing hard and weak at the knees and shaking for more. But Carol realises very quickly what she’s doing and what she’s already done giving him books and pictures and thinking about him before she falls asleep, and she pulls away. Daryl growls, a keening noise, low in his throat, thick with need, and she would have gone back to him at that, would have done _anything_ for him to still that noise, but there’s a knock on the door that startles them both and Daryl steps back from her like she’s hit him.

“Moving out, Dixon,” a voice calls and Carol _stares_ at him. She notices the rucksack and boots next to the door and the hat sat on top.

“Now?” she gasps the word out. “I thought- “

“Now,” Daryl confirms, his voice a low rumble. “Shit.” 

They stand awkwardly by the door. Carol puts her hands behind her back to keep herself from reaching to him, making this harder than it has to be. He chews at his lip, doesn't meet her eyes, and she knows that it’s going to have to be her that cuts him loose. She steps away from the door and next to him, turns to face it, and he bows his head. He tugs his boots on, not bothering to tie the laces properly, and shrugs the bag across his back. He doesn't kiss her goodbye, just takes her hand, brushes his lips across her knuckles, an absurd gesture but tender too, and a shock of feeling ripples through Carol and she knows that she’s a second away from crying. She hadn't shed one tear for Ed, not really. 

“I’ll write you,” she whispers and he nods, jams his hat on his head, and is gone. 

She stands in his empty room for a long time, wondering what might have happened if he hadn't left. What will never happen now. She locks his door carefully before she leaves and heads back to her empty house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you! :')


	8. Chapter 8

Daryl walks. His wound itches and burns and he doesn't look at it, he knows that if he sees it, a piece of him rotting away, that he won’t be able to keep going. So he walks and his wound eats his flesh and he forces himself to think only of Carol. It is impossible, of course, and when he lays down at night to sleep, everything else floods in. Like the way Merle’s eyes had glittered in the dark before he got himself killed. Like how Daryl feels filled to the brim with guilt and horror and the blood of a thousand corpses he’s helped put in the ground.

Most of all he think about cowardice and what that word means. Carol will not recognise him, won’t feel kind toward a man without honour or glory or bravery. She’d asked him to come back to her but its not the same thing as doing it. She never knew him, _they_ never knew each other, and now she’d look at him like he was a man worse than the husband who’d still left for war before he’d been brave enough. He reads her poems and looks at her picture and he ignores the blood that is soaking through his shirt. He walks and he doesn't think about the day when he won’t be able to anymore.

It’s getting colder too, harder to wake up as well as everything else. The air is sharp with ice and most mornings he can’t get warm enough to catch anything to eat. He drinks meltwater and it cuts his mouth. He tries to move faster because he’s scared that if he stops he’ll freeze in place. A statue of ice, a memorial for cowardice. He thinks that he would be satisfied with dying if he saw Carol again just once and he tries to count out how many days he thinks he’ll last. 

“You left your gun behind, little brother,” Merle tells him, a ghost breathing scorn down his neck, flashing passed his eyes like a lightning strike and then gone. “You've got four days.”

He has four days. Probably less. Not enough in any case. But on the third day he is found. 

The woman finds him in the morning before he wakes and he opens his eyes to a lined face and white hair looking down at him. For a moment he thinks he’s died and she’s an angel but he knows he’d never get to heaven and he struggles to sit up. 

“You look like death warmed up,” the woman tells him, and all he can do is stare.

He follows her back to a cabin with goats in a pen and she has a fire roaring and meat cooking and he thinks he starts crying at some point. Her eyes soften anyway and she gives him a bowl of food that he shovels into his mouth with dirty fingers.

“You’ll need to lie down,” she tells him. “You been favouring one side, I can tell, even walking like a dead man as you are. You’re hurt somewhere.” 

“‘m fine,” he croaks, keeping his eyes on his food. 

“You’re not,” she says firmly. “Lie down or I’ll take that and you can leave. I can’t have corpses here, ‘specially not corpses the Home Guard’ll find interesting.” 

He looks at her through the fringe of his lashes and her expression is hard as steel (he thinks of Carol). He knows the wound will kill him even with a belly full of goat meat. He gets to his feet, follows her to a bench where he lies down and turns to face the wall. He flinches when she lifts his shirt, he would do that even if he wasn’t hurt, and she makes a noise like she’s scolding him.

“I’ll have to cut some of this away,” she tells him quietly. “I’ll clean it, put some herbs on it and I’ll stitch it up. It’ll heal ugly, but it’ll heal.” 

He grunts in reply, takes the piece of wood she offers him, and clamps it between his teeth. It doesn't stop him screaming when the hot knife cuts into his flesh. He screams against the wood until the pain is too much and the smell of burning flesh is too much and everything dims and fades and then disappears entirely. 

When he wakes she hands him a drink full of strong smelling herbs without speaking and it’s bitter as sin but he drinks down every drop. It dulls the pain in his side but he knows immediately that it’s a different pain than before. It’s sharp and it’s vicious but it’s not the dull, poisonous ache that was sapping the life from him. This is a healing sort of pain. 

He stays with the woman for more than a week. She feeds him and changes his bandages and lets him sleep on the bench where she cut him open. She gives him a knife to shave with. He begins to feel almost like a human being. She doesn't speak much but neither does he and they live together for that brief time in comfortable silence.

Merle walks through his dreams, swearing bloody vengeance, and Daryl wakes up sometimes with his face wet with tears and brushes them off angrily. 

“You’re a coward and a soft touch,” Merle says, standing over him, tall as the highest mountain and dark as the stormiest cloud. “You’re gonna die out here before you see that skirt again.” 

He only shows up when Daryl’s just out of sleep, the remains of a nightmare, and he tries to think only about the real Merle, the one who saved his life, and it softens the blow some. 

“I got a woman waiting,” he tells the woman one night as they stare into the fire. 

“I thought it might be something like that,” she says dryly. “You don’t look like the type doin’ it for himself.” 

“I’m scared too,” he admits after a pause, something about this woman’s silence making him want to spill everything he has. 

“You aren't scareder than anyone else,” she sighs. “Now get some sleep, I’ll want you out of here in the morning.” 

She’s lying of course, she doesn't _know_ , but he takes what she tells him and doesn't argue the point. There isn't any harm in her lies.

He leaves with his rucksack full of food and herbs for healing and a coat of goat skin to keep the cold out and an old gun to replace the one he’d let a dead soldier take from him. The woman doesn't say anything about it, she isn't even there to say anything to him when he leaves, he just finds a bag packed by the door, waiting for him. He’s glad of it, her absence, goodbyes get tiresome in war and they lose their meaning quickly. She must know he is grateful. He leaves her cabin and gets back on his way and for the first time in a long time he thinks he might really get back to her. Fulfill the promise that he never made. Go back to Carol who might well hate him as much as he loves her.


	9. Chapter 9

It’s getting colder at the farm. They’re having to go further to hunt. Maggie is a sharp shot but without anything _alive_ for her to shoot at, her talent is wasted. Carol decides they ought to take a trip, stay out in the cabin in the woods that the Greene’s own, hunt something substantial, animals to cure and store and keep for the real winter. 

They bundle up in coats and trousers and scarves. Maggie and Beth wear old coats of their fathers and Beth’s almost reaches her ankles but she can walk in it well enough. Carol thinks Beth ought to stay back but Maggie mentions that the Home Guard are still out, still restless, and they take her along, sat astride the old Clydesdale while the other two walk. They’d swapped the piano for the horse with an old rich couple from Raleigh and Carol had held back tears because it wasn't hers to grieve for. She’d folded up the sheet music Daryl had given her to keep under her pillow at night. She tiptoes her fingers across it sometimes like the keys are etched into the paper.

Carol wears Ed’s coat and his boots to make their trip, to big by far but better than what she has. She stuffs wool socks into the toes. She’d picked the clothing up when she’d gone back to the house to check Ed had kept his promise. It had been empty and cold but she’d taken the rifle anyway and grabbed a few things she thought they might need back at the farm. Clothing and old stores of pickled fruits and vegetables that she’d forgotten about. A simple portrait she’d had done of Sophia at five years old.

They trudge up to the cabin in high spirits. Beth sings to them from her perch atop the large horse, pulling her scarf down from her mouth so her voice rings out sweet and clear. _As a songbird that has fallen, only to regain the sky, from this frozen shadow valley they must be revived_. It gives them hope, this is a trip that will make their winter easier, keep them alive. It is snowing now and their boots and the horses hooves leave imprints that don’t reach green grass, but it will be thicker soon, and colder.

The cabin was bought with the idea that Hershel would go up there to reflect and to write but he’d only been a few times before he got too ill. He decided that his thoughts were more helpful spoken to the people and Maggie and Beth hadn't complained, they’d always been wary of him travelling too far from the house. It’s a small cabin, only one room, with a desk and chair and two cots and a fireplace in one corner. The trip takes two hours, going at a slow pace, but when they get there, the cabin isn't empty. 

Carol falls back a step when she realises that it’s Ed in the room. Ed, lying on one of the beds, staring at the ceiling. Ed who won't’ just _leave her alone_. Maggie has the gun raised to her shoulder before anyone but Carol can blink.

“Get to your feet, Mr Peletier,” Maggie barks, pushing Beth back out the door behind her. 

Ed stands, rubbing a knuckle into his eyes blearily, squinting at them like he’s never seen a human soul in all his life. Carol wants to hit him, break her hands on his face like he so often did to her. She steps ahead of Maggie, her eyes blazing, her fists clenched. 

“I told you to leave, Ed,” she cries. “That don’t mean climb two hours up the mountain and steal a cabin.” 

“Carol,” he raises his eyes skyward. “What kind of wife do I have who wants to send me to die?” 

“The kind who has others to care for than you,” she spits back. 

His face twists with rage and he’s twice the size of any of them even hollowed out by war. But Maggie has the gun and she raises it higher and only Carol and Beth can see that her hands are shaking. 

“I will shoot you where you stand,” she says, her voice cold as the air. Ed looks at her for a long moment, apparently trying to figure out this slight, pretty woman in mens clothing with her cheeks flushed and her eyes fierce. His frown deepens but he nods.

“Awright, I’m not gonna stay here and be cowed by some bitch with more money than sense,” he mutters. “Get out of here and I’ll leave.” 

They step to the side, out of the doorway, but Maggie keeps the gun raised as Ed gathers his meagre possessions. A bottle and a coat and a threadbare scarf. A part of Carol wants to wrap it around his neck like she did when they were first married, tuck it into his collar and swipe a palm across it to smooth the wool. Another part of Carol still wants to break his face open. She steps back instead, keeps her eyes on the dirty snow at the doorway, waiting to see his boots come stomping through. She doesn't want to look at his face again. 

He grumbles under his breath as he walks out and only Carol can hear the sob hidden under his gruff voice. He had been a good man once. He wasn't now, but he had been. He stops in front of her and she raises her eyes, tries to hold his gaze, can’t really, can barely look at him. 

“I’ll be back, Carol,” he tells her. “You’re still my wife.” 

“I know, Ed,” she whispers. “And I wish everyday that weren't true.” 

The blow he strikes her hits hard and fast, his right fist glancing off her cheekbone so savage that she sees stars and staggers back in the snow. Maggie yells and Beth screams and Carol swings right back at her husband. She hits him square in the eye and it’s not a hard blow but it shocks a gasp from him, makes his mouth drop open in surprise, and she must look some kind of fierce with her short hair and men’s trousers because he stumbles backwards and has left them behind in all the time it takes for Maggie’s yells to turn to laughter. 

Beth tends to the bruise that is blooming below Carol’s eye. She packs a handful of snow to it and murmurs soft, nonsense words of comfort. Carol’s hand is stinging too but there’s no bruising or broken skin at her knuckles so she just rests it in the snow while Beth fusses. 

Not long after Ed has left a gunshot rattles the air. Carol is on her feet and out the door in a moment and Maggie and Beth don’t say anything, just make sure she has the gun and her coat and her scarf. She knows it will be Ed before she reaches his body blooming red across the snow. She knows it will be the Home Guard too before she sees their horses and the man with the eyepatch staring down at her dead husband. She knows because they seem like the only options in all the world, the only way this all could _end_. 

“Did you know he was here?” The man with the eyepatch asks and she nods, slowly. 

“I didn't ask him back,” she says quietly, unable to keep her eyes off Ed, face down, all the red draining from his body. “He hit me when I told him to leave. That was just an hour ago. We would've told you when we came down from here.” 

“Why are you here?” 

“Hunting for winter.” 

“You’re in Hershel Greene’s cabin?” 

Carol doesn't say anything, just continues to stare at her husband. Her face is throbbing something awful and he is face down in dirt and snow and blood. 

“We’ll be back to check on you girls,” one of the men says. “Check you ain't got anymore stowaways.”

They leave in a clatter of hooves. Carol goes back to the cabin, takes a shovel from where it’s leaning against the outside wall, and heads back to Ed. She can’t break the earth, it’s frozen solid, and as much as she slams the blade down it just glances off the icy dirt. She tries harder. She screams a little with each blow she strikes. Ed lies facedown in the red snow.

Maggie and Beth find her clutching a shovel streaked in blood from her blistered hands and crying, knelt next to a body half hidden under dirty snow. Maggie takes the shovel and Beth takes Carol’s hands in hers, holds her carefully by the wrists, draws Carol up to her feet as gently as she can. 

Maggie remains with the body, doing what she can with hard packed dirt and snow. Beth and Carol go back to the cabin. Carol stays silent as Beth gently washes her hands with water warmed over their fire. 

“You saved us, you know,” Beth tells her quietly when it becomes clear that Carol won’t speak. “You are so different now than the person you were when daddy brought us here. You were still that person when we asked you for help, but you saved us all the same.” 

Carol doesn’t reply, she stares into the fire and wishes desperately that Daryl would come back to her. It had been her only request, that he would give up an impossible war to keep his life and come back. Her hands sting with the water despite Beth’s gentle touch. She doesn't feel different, she feels old and cold and beaten. 

Maggie spends the rest of the afternoon hunting and Beth sits with Carol in the cabin. They don’t speak much, Carol sleeps sometimes, Beth sings. She thinks she ought to be glad that Ed had died, but she’s not. She’s empty of everything but the desire to see Daryl again, to have him close to her, not necessarily touching, just close, immovable and constant and _there_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two chapters today because i've lost control of my life. the song that Beth sings is from the Cold Mountain OST (which I highly recommend btw). Thank you!


	10. Chapter 10

Daryl keeps his wound as neat and clean as he can, the woman told him to, she gave him extra cloth bandages and he wraps them around himself so thoroughly he feels like a corpse ready to be buried already. The wound doesn't open, it stays closed, it keeps healing, but the walking and the cold still take a toll. He can hunt again, he can trap squirrels and sometimes quails and once an old, half starved turkey, but it’s not nearly enough. Somehow he keeps alive and Merle walks beside him and tells him that every step will be his last.

But he thinks he’s getting close. The forests stop looking all the same and start looking like places he might recognise. Places related to the wilderness where he grew up. It is too cold for the Cherokee Rose, he knows this, but part of him wants to see it, winking gold against the snow. A bouquet to pick and offer to Carol, an apology for staying so far from her and for so long. Carol who has a husband. Carol who kissed him, whose small hand had curled up against his skin. Carol who gave him _poetry_ when so many people he’d known had assumed he couldn't even read. 

“Carol who took pity on you,” Merle sneers. “Carol who won’t want a man who killed his own brother.” 

He walks through heavy snow and his goat skin coat gets soaked through and the holes in Merle’s boots become quickly apparent. He dreams of being dry again, of being whole again, of being full of food and warm again. Gold with sun and swaying grass and Carol’s waist under his hands. He is so close. His fingers start to itch with what he imagines Carol will feel like against them. Should she let him touch her he knows he will feel like the luckiest man that ever lived. He starts to pick out trees he knows from the forest, pieces of Carolina, he says their names like spells to guide him home. He walks down a gully, a tunnel of snow and trees.

“White Ash,” he mumbles, out loud. “Bitternut Hickory, Scarlet Oak.” 

“Turn back,” a voice cries and at first he thinks it’s Merle but the voice tugs at something else in him, some part of him Merle never reached, and he looks up.

There is a figure in the snow standing higher than him. Someone slight, in trousers, holding a gun. Someone with a fierce, hollow expression and a bruised face and raggedly cut grey hair. Someone pointing a gun at him. Daryl thinks he will kill this person. Rip them to pieces before they can do the same to him so close to Carol. He steps forward, and the light shifts, casting silver across the figure and he knows _her_. 

“Carol Peletier,” he says, his voice scarcely above a whisper, and it's the first time he’s ever said her name out loud. It is her. It _is her_. He wants to tell her how hard it has been, he’s been coming to her on a hard road and when he has her he will not let her go. But she raises her gun higher, fires a shot over his head, and birds fly, black and wicked between them. Next to him Merle laughs. He always knew that this would be the way things would end. 

Carol thinks he is a deserter, someone Ed gave her name to, and she stands her ground. Ed was dead and this man would be dead soon too, this scarecrow, this skeleton in grey rags and dirt and blood. She won’t go to the Home Guard, she won’t ever speak to them again, but she will kill this man if he steps closer. Beth and Maggie are at the cabin, tending to the game they’d already caught, and she will not let them be hurt by any man, sick with war as he might be. 

“I don’t know you!” she roars and he sways on the spot. His shoulders slump and she squares hers. 

“I've made a mistake,” he chokes out. He bows his head and turns away from her to go back the way he came and then there’s something in the way he moves, some tiny thing, the snow or the birds or his figure dark against light. Something in his angles and straights, the knuckles of his hands, the hunch of his shoulders, the curve of his back. The way his fingers twitch at his sides and drift upwards where she thinks he will chew at his thumb. She _knows_ him. 

“Daryl,” she cries, stumbling forward, a sob building up in the back of her throat, a moment away from spilling, and he turns back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is short, i'm sorry, but it's Important. Thank you for reading!


	11. Chapter 11

Carol takes Daryl back to the cabin. They don’t touch, they walk side by side, slowly, both trying figure out if what is happening is _real_. The sun hits the snow in ways that make it seem like maybe it isn't, it’s a waking dream, drenched in bright light and wishful thinking. Carol thinks that if she touches him he will disappear and Daryl thinks that if he touches her she will hate him. 

“Mr Dixon,” Beth breathes, eyes wide, as soon as they walk inside. 

“He looks played out,” Maggie says, pursing her lips. “Get him sitting down.” 

Daryl sways where he’s stood, can’t really figure out this group of women, is immediately self-conscious. He folds in on himself like his bones can’t hold him up, his shoulders hunch inwards, he doesn't look at any of them. Carol dishes him up a bowl of the stew they have simmering over the fireplace. He takes it and their fingers brush and it’s only because Carol still has a hand to it that the bowl doesn't fall to the ground. She offers it to him again and without a word he takes it. 

The light the fire casts about the room is bright and eerie and it darkens the shadows on Daryl’s face so much he looks like a skull. Carol can’t look away from him, she thinks that even in such harsh light he is the only man she wants to touch. She folds her hands in her lap instead, lets him eat. 

“You ought to sleep,” she tells him quietly. “When you’re done with that. You look like you might topple over, even sat down.” 

“I’m awake,” he mumbles around a mouthful of stew. His hands tighten on the spoon. He is afraid that if he closes his eyes, his dream of Carol will be over, he will lose her again after spending so long finding her. There is exhaustion in his very bones but he knows that she will disappear if he so much as blinks. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” she says, like she can hear what he’s thinking, the first small acknowledgement of what they are to one another. “I’ll sit and tend to the fire.”

“I've got hunting to do, Beth has skinning, Carol’ll stay,” Maggie declares, staring down at the man who is sitting at her father’s desk. “She’s not a ghost. I can’t say whether or not you are.” 

Daryl says nothing, he continues to eat, he nods slightly in agreement. Maggie leaves and Beth stays, watching Daryl like he’s some kind of exotic creature she’s never encountered before. The war has changed him in almost every way. 

When he is done with the food he hands the bowl back to Carol, hoping for another kiss from her hands, but she doesn't touch him, just stacks the bowl next to the fire with some others. 

“Into bed,” she orders and her voice feels to him like deliciously cool water, washing him of every kind of horror.

He does what she asks. He takes his boots off, molded and stuck to his feet as they are, and she wrinkles her nose but doesn't say anything. His socks are tatters. He leaves everything else on, including his goat skin coat, he puts his gun on the floor. He is asleep before he can register that she has quietly taken a place at the foot of his bed. She rests a hand on the blanket that covers his ankle and he dreams and for the first time in what feels like a hundred years, Merle is absent. 

“You’ll be leaving us then,” Beth says when she is sure Daryl is deep asleep. “You’ll go back to your house in the weeds.”

“No,” Carol shakes her head. “That’s Ed’s house. I’ll sell it maybe, when money is worth anything again. I’ll stay with you girls even if you won’t have Daryl there.”

“He doesn't look like a person,” Beth says then, looking at the bowed head, the dirty hair, the hollowed out face. 

Carol doesn't say anything but privately she agrees. He looks nothing like the man who left her. Maybe he is that man stretched out to nothing. But she wants him still. She had _needed_ Ed when she was a blushing bride, eighteen years old, and she doesn't need Daryl, but she knows she wants him. 

Maggie arrives back at twilight, just before Daryl wakes. When he stirs in the bed, she gives a pointed look to Beth who blushes slightly and follows her sister outside muttering something about cleaning their catches. Carol still sits at the foot of Daryl’s bed and when he realises this he starts slightly, sits up, moves backward.

“Are you hungry?” she asks and he shakes his head. He can’t look away from her, she looks so beautiful to him it makes his cheekbones hurt. She holds her hands in her lap and he chews at his lips. 

“I got your letters,” he mumbles finally. He fumbles with the pockets of his coat and draws out a filthy, burnt swathe of letters, and her tintype too. “I couldn't find the words to write back.” 

Carol gets to her feet, moves down the length of her bed to sit closer to him. She kisses him softly before she can think that maybe she shouldn't. It’s chaste and short and warm and Daryl can hardly move during it. They both feel out the ways their lips are touching, what it’s like to have another person so close. His face is wet, or maybe it’s hers. She pulls away and he bows his head against her shoulder and she palms at his hair, pushes her face against his ear, presses her lips to the dirty skin at his neck. He’s breathing like he’s been running his whole life and when he says her name it’s the most ragged, near-dead thing she’s ever heard and it almost stops her heart. 

She presses her hands to his chest, pushes him back gently so she can climb into the bed and lie down next to him, facing him on the narrow, broken down cot. He brushes a thumb across the bruise at her cheek, his expression a thousand yards deep. Part of her thinks she ought to tell him that Ed has died, but she doesn't want to speak his name. Not while her hands are on Daryl’s skin, in his hair, not while she is pressed against the length of him, so she lets it lie. 

“How much has this hurt you?” she asks him instead and a shudder runs through his body like he’s swallowing it all down as deep as it will go.

“Here, on this bed,” he starts, his voice raw and rough and uncertain. “Here, with you...an’ you _lettin’_ me...I don’ mind the parts I lost.” 

Carol shuffles closer to him, curls her hands around his waist, under his shirt, over the bandages still wrapped around his torso. She buries her face in his chest and somehow he is still shocked by the movement and by her willingness to be close to him. He is filthy and he is wounded and he has war in his eyes, he knows this, but her nose rests just below his collarbone and her fingers curl under his ribs like they are made to fit there. He breathes in the scent of her hair, she smells of snow and of gunsmoke and of pine needles, and he shuts his eyes and they fall asleep together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone who is reading, you're just the best :)


	12. Chapter 12

Carol wakes first. Maggie and Beth are shuffling around the room, busy with breakfast, and the door is open and cold air and bright sun are pouring in. She sits up, looks down at Daryl who has his face buried in the pillow and a handful of her shirt in his fist. She gently disentangles it, unable to keep from smiling. 

It is clear that Beth is trying desperately to keep something back and Maggie’s eyebrows are raised so high they’re near lost in her hair and Carol ignores all of it and helps herself to porridge from the pot simmering over the fire. 

“You kept all your clothes on,” Maggie mutters finally. “ _That’s_ a surprise. All this time you've spent waiting for him and we left the room so you’d have some privacy and you fell asleep in trousers.”

“Miss Margaret Greene,” Carol says sternly, trying to hide her smile. “If your daddy could hear you.” 

“He’d smack you for not getting that man outta his clothes,” Beth pipes up, grinning wickedly. 

Carol snorts into her porridge and across the room Daryl wakes up with a gasp and the Greene sisters collapse into giggles. Daryl sits up, watches the girls laughing for a moment, his expression terribly wary. He is uncomfortable immediately, he arranges his crooked clothing, ducks down behind the fringe of his hair. Instinctively he reaches for his gun, still on the floor next to the bed, but he checks the movement quickly, thinking better of it, and leaves it there. 

“G’morning,” he mumbles, not moving from his seat or looking up. Carol thinks he looks like raw honey, sleep rumpled and sweet and soft, his hair stuck up at all angles and his hands resting in his lap, his fingers curled into his palms. She wants to scoop him up and taste him. She wants to soothe the part of him that reaches for a gun as soon as he wakes. 

“Come and eat,” she says instead.

He gets to his feet, clumsily attempting to straighten his clothing, his hair, failing miserably at both. He takes a bowl from Carol, hot porridge, thick with dried fruit and nuts, and he sits back on the bed. Without a word, Carol moves to sit next to him. He rests his bowl on his knees to free a hand and slowly and carefully curls his arm around her waist to tug her just a little closer. 

“I’ll have to leave,” he tells the room, he tells his knees. “It’ll go bad for y’all if the Home Guard catch me here.”

Carol shuts her eyes against what he’s saying, though she knows it’s true. Maggie and Beth don’t say anything. Maggie watches Carol carefully like she’s afraid she might splinter and break and Carol keeps her eyes closed because she doesn’t want to see those questions in Maggie’s eyes. Daryl’s fingers tap out a rhythm against the curve of Carol’s hip.

“We’re leaving today,” Maggie says after a long silence. “We've got enough meat to last a thousand winters and it’s crying out for salt.” 

“I’ll go ahead then,” Daryl says. “I know some places round the edge of town I can hide out some.” 

“You’ll go to our barn,” Maggie says, dusting her hands off. “It’ll keep Carol happy, I think, supposing you don’t mind sharing a bed with a horse the size of the mountain.” 

“I shouldn't stay on your farm at all.” 

“You've no connection to us,” Carol says suddenly, eyes snapping open, jaw clenched stubbornly. “They killed Ed already, the girls’ daddy is dead, we got no one left. If they find reason to search our barn, I’ll kill them before they get to you.” 

Daryl’s fingers stop moving against Carol’s side. He looks at her, at her red rimmed eyes and her hands clenched so hard the knuckles are white. The bruise on her cheek and her hair in wild curls and her jaw bitten down hard, not quite stopping her lower lip from trembling. She is holding herself like a hurricane on a leash and he wants to sooth her down from those high and dangerous heights. He takes her hand, presses the tips of his fingers to the calluses on her palms before braiding their fingers together. She has fought a war, just as he has, she is a string pulled tight and frayed almost to breaking, just as he is.

“The war’ll be over in a month anyway,” Beth says quietly, sadly, a phrase worn pale with falsehood. 

“You’ll stay in the barn, and we’ll deal with the Home Guard if they come. We've been doing it for a long time,” Maggie says gently, looking at Carol not Daryl. “They won’t take him from you.”

Carol makes a noise, a swift hiss through her teeth, like pain held back, and her grip on his hand tightens to an almost painful degree. 

“No, they won’t,” she says.

The rest of the morning is spent readying themselves for the journey back. They butcher the meat and pack the horse and Daryl hovers around them, trying to decide whether he should just slip away while they’re busy. His gun is back at his hip and his pack was never emptied. But Carol’s eyes follow him and he doesn't want her out of his sight either and they circle one another like they’re both not quite sure if they should come together or pull away. It will take two hours to get down the mountain. Two hours where she is not in his field of vision. Two hours back to walking like he has been ever since he left the hospital. 

They give him food for the trip and send him on his way. Carol brushes a hand across her eyes when she looks at him, tries to hide tears with a smile. She thinks she must look ridiculous, a woman passed forty playing at a schoolgirl in love. And he looks just as he did in the snow when she first found him. A scarecrow burnt out by war. She wishes so badly that she might see him passed this, filled out with happiness, sat on the deck of the Greene farm, reading a book in the sunshine, but she feels terribly like she will never get to see him without war in his bones. 

She smooths down the lapels of his coat, leaves her palms pressed to his chest, trying to feel his heartbeat through many layers of shabby cloth. She will make him a new coat, she decides, when they’re back safe at the farm. 

“I’ll...see you at the farm then,” she says, her voice deliberately steady. He nods, unable to speak, and stumbles forward before he can think not to and presses his mouth clumsily to hers. She smiles under his lips and he shifts away, rests his forehead against hers briefly, pulls back. Her hands are still held at his chest. He slings his pack across his shoulders, nods to the Greene girls, and heads out into the snow. 

Carol very deliberately doesn't watch him go. She thinks that seeing him walk away from her will be too much, so she turns away from him as soon as he starts. They’ll wait an hour before they leave. He’ll be halfway back by then. Halfway _home_. 

When gunshots rings out only ten minutes later, her knees give out completely and she falls where she’s standing. She doesn't hear Maggie and Beth calling her name as she staggers to her feet. The gunshots echo over and over in her head until they’re all that she can hear and she starts to run before either of the girls can reach her. She takes the gun. This will _not_ be like Ed, she tells herself as she hurls through the snow. Daryl will be live and whole and waiting for her with arms outstretched. 

He is lying on red snow and his is not the only body. Strewn about him like fallen leaves are the Home Guard, dead or dying, and the man with the eyepatch is the only one standing still, his gun leveled at Daryl in the snow. Carol screams his name and the man with the eyepatch turns and Daryl makes a pleading sound that cracks something in her heart and then she has the gun to her shoulder and has fired and there is a red mist in the air and empty space where half of the other man’s face used to be and he is falling. 

She drops the gun, falls hard to her knees beside Daryl. Ignoring the rest, she tugs him into her lap and he moves. His eyelashes flutter. He is warm and there is blood at his head, but nowhere else. He is warm and he is _breathing_ and he moves again, struggles in her lap some, quiets when she runs her hands down his arms, over his chest, checking for wounds she doesn't find. His eyelashes flutter again and he opens his eyes and it’s like looking into sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry, I'll fix it.


	13. Chapter 13

When she tries to think on it, Carol can’t remember a moment of their trip down the mountain. She knows, because Maggie tells her, that they strap Daryl to the horse with their belts, and that her hands were covered in blood, and that Daryl kept saying her name, over and over again. She knows, because Beth tells her, that they had tried to give her the gun to carry down and she had screamed and fallen backwards to get away from it. But the only thing that slips through are dreams, every night, of herself, stood in snow, blowing the face of the man with the eyepatch into bloody dust. Dreams of Daryl, stood like a scarecrow in the snow, unmoving, unresponsive. Those days are a dark space she tries hard to ignore, a blot over the land, a spot of rot in her heart, and she tells herself it is good she can’t remember more.

The first clear memory she has from those days, is looking down into the well behind the farmhouse and dropping her wedding ring into the dark. She knows that she smiles at the sound it makes, bouncing off the stones on the way down, a sweeter sound than she ever heard from Ed. She knows that it’s the day she finally accepts that Daryl will live. 

The snow falls heavily that year and then it melts and the gardens grow. Beth plants sunflowers outside all of the bedroom windows and they stretch up tall, bowing in the sunlight. Carol plants a Cherokee Rose under the oak tree in the front garden and it crawls up the trunk, tangles itself in the branches, blooms flowers that make her heart calm and still. 

The war doesn't end in a month but it is over in a year and everything is different and the same somehow and Carol pretends like it never happened. She concentrates on her girls instead of her dreams and they grow tall like the sunflowers and they stay wild like the roses and it becomes easier to call them _hers_. She sells Ed’s house when she can and uses the money to buy livestock to fill their paddocks and hire farmhands to help them run it. The first time they make cheese they get happily drunk on green wine. 

The bullet that throws Daryl into the snow leaves him alive but takes his ear and he keeps his hair long to hide it. She and Daryl never do make vows but it is clear they belong to one another and they endure the whispers spat at them. Maggie doesn't enforce the rule keeping Daryl in the barn and barely even raises an eyebrow when he moves into Carol’s room as soon as he’s properly healed. 

He stays out of sight until the war is over. He still sees Merle sometimes, hears his voice whispering the worst things he knows about himself. True things. But they stop meaning anything when Carol smiles at him. She can see these things just as Merle could but to her they are things to be accepted, to be gentled, to be smoothed like salt water over the jagged edges of a broken bottle. He is glass still, brittle and easy to break, but she is the sea and she is _everything_. 

They sit in the sun together, Daryl thumbs through an old book of poems, frowning slightly, chewing at his lower lip. Carol puts a glass of tea on the step next to him, moves back inside to the piano in the hallway, leaves the front door open wide. He had bought it for her, with money he’d earned ploughing fields. The sheets of music she’d kept under her pillow, all through the war, sit proudly in the music rack and a jar sits on top of it, full to an absurd degree with Cherokee roses. Her fingers hover over the keys and she purses her lips, narrows her eyes at the notes in front of her, like she’s fighting a new kind of battle. Maggie brushes passed her carrying a basket, off to pull up carrots.

“If you’re going to start being romantic, best do it quietly,” she says easily. “Beth’s in a mood.”

Carol laughs, brushes her fingers across the keys lightly, presses one down experimentally, smiles at the sweet sound it makes. Beth’s _moods_ usually involve whatever boy has decided he loves her and how little she can bring herself to care.

“It ain't romantic,” Daryl calls from outside, not looking up from his book. “It’s music.” 

“You’ll find a way to make it so,” Maggie sighs, and then she’s gone into the garden. 

Carol watches Daryl as he shifts on the steps, flips a page, presses the pad of his thumb against his mouth, takes it away. His boots are unlaced, she notices. His jacket needs mending, she notices. She’ll have to teach him how to stitch a hole, he’s not one for caring about his clothing but she won’t do it every time. Something about that thought, his carelessness, the graceful way he slouches in the sun, makes her pause, and she shuts the lid of the piano and stands. She walks back outside, sits down next to him, rests her head against his shoulder, and he starts a little, he always does, still surprised by her touch after all this time. 

“A woman waits for me,” he reads out loud, surprising her in turn. “She contains all, nothing is lacking.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end! Thank you so much for reading, this was my first ever caryl fic and it happened so fast I don't even know how I did it. I've loved writing it though, and I've loved all your love comments. Thank you forever! More Caryl to come :)


End file.
